The Missing Pages

Natalie Dykstra’s Biography of Clover Adams

“It’s possible to make books of a certain fascination,” Thornton Wilder once said, “if you scrupulously leave out the essential.” Wilder was commenting on “The Education of Henry Adams,” that masterly autobiography in which Adams purposefully excluded any direct mention of his wife, Clover, their marriage or her shocking suicide. In fact, posterity has occasionally hinted that Adams was partly responsible for Clover’s death, as if omitting her from “The Education” suggests guilt rather than a surfeit of feeling. Adams did tell a friend that the “great calamities in life leave one speechless,” and three years after Clover died he wrote that he was still “sad, sad, sad.” He then burned some of the diaries he kept during his marriage. If Clover left a suicide note, he must have burned that too. “Wisdom,” he declared, “is silence.”

For biographers, though, silence is seductive. Absent sources stir speculation. And the latest biography of Clover Adams, melodramatically subtitled “A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life,” takes the idea of loss as the theme of her story. To Natalie Dyk­stra, the life of Marian Hooper (nicknamed Clover) was founded in grief and early sorrow, and in a touch of madness.

Although Clover’s maternal grandfather, a China trader, was one of the richest men in Boston, her maternal grandmother sealed herself off to pace in a darkened room after the death of her only son. Clover’s mother, who had published poetry in the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial, died of consumption in 1848 when her daughter was 5. A favorite aunt drank arsenic when Clover was 9. “Crazy as coots,” was the way Henry Adams’s brother described the family. Clover’s sister would later walk into the path of an oncoming train, and her brother would fall or throw himself out of a third-story window. In retrospect, Clover’s troubled life, with its early death, seems a foregone conclusion.

Though Dykstra wants to narrate Clover’s story as she lived it, her suicide shades every gesture, every mood, every lacuna in her short life. (She died at 42.) Yet Clover was well educated, athletic and intelligent. Her vocation, as befitted her class and kind, was marriage. In 1872, at 28, she wed Henry Adams, who had recently given up his position as a Washington journalist to edit the North American Review and teach medieval history at Harvard. It was a good match: he was the grandson and great-grandson of presidents; she was the devoted daughter of an ophthalmologist whose own father presided over the largest bank in Marblehead, Mass. Clover and Henry were witty, intrigued by power and in love. Henry James called her a “perfect Voltaire in petticoats”; later her husband would be hailed as the American Voltaire.

Both the Adamses were racked by self-doubt. During their yearlong honeymoon, which included a trip on the Nile, Clover seems to have fallen apart. Dykstra attributes the apparent breakdown to the fact that Clover was desperately missing the one man she truly adored: “The anchoring love of her father must have seemed a million miles away.” Clover recovered, and the Adamses returned to Boston with 25 crates of china, glass, paintings, linen and mementos: this was the gilded part of the heartbreaking life.

Photo

Clover AdamsCredit
Massachusetts Historical Society

After Henry resigned from Harvard in 1877, the couple rented a place in Washington with a view of the White House. Late in the day, after Henry finished working on his histories, he and his wife entertained guests at tea. Clover was the consummate hostess, her invitations highly sought. But Henry James noted, in a story inspired by the Adamses, that their circle “left out, on the whole, more people than it took in.”

At the end of each week, Clover wrote her father letters teeming with sprightly, caustic tales about Washington life — or about art, which she and Henry avidly collected. It’s odd that Dykstra doesn’t quote at length from these letters, which would allow us to hear Clover’s voice more directly. She skewered President Chester A. Arthur as “our chuckleheaded sovereign.” She admired Watteau, found William Morris affected. “A New England pig would sicken at the stuff we have to eat,” she wrote from Madrid. However, even when corresponding with her father Clover reveals little of what she felt, doesn’t hint at whatever demons may have possessed her.

The Adamses did not suffer bores, partly, as Adams told John Hay, because they themselves were “bored to death with ourselves. . . . At long intervals we chirp feebly to each other, then sleep and dream sad dreams.” Enter Elizabeth Cameron, an ebullient young woman with, Dykstra warns, an “impossibly slender waist” and “a come-hither look.” Interpreting Adams’s novel “Esther” biographically, Dykstra presumes that he was smitten, that the fizz had gone from his marriage. Perhaps, she adds, Lizzie’s youth represented to Clover “the vanishing possibility that she and Henry would ever have a child.”

In 1883, when a restless Clover began to take pictures with a new camera, she was thus exploring “loss and a love of beauty,” Dykstra claims, “woven together with queries about life’s meaning and a woman’s place.” Dykstra admires Clover’s photographs, which she gracefully describes in the sort of detail that distinguishes this biography from earlier ones. In them she finds the living Clover she has sought, whether in an array of maternal figures, “as if to bring her own mother back into view,” or in people who don’t look at one another or at the camera. Though these pictures lack vitality — or, rather, because they do — Dykstra claims that Clover was able to transform her feelings of loss and isolation into art. Nonetheless, as Dyk­stra admits, Clover’s photography “did not and could not save her.”

In the spring of 1885, after her father died, Clover crashed. Despite Henry’s valiant attempts to distract her, eight months later she swallowed a vial of potassium cyanide, a chemical she used to develop her photographs, thereby turning herself into her own enigmatic work of art. “Poor Mrs. Adams found, the other day,” Henry James remarked, “the solution of the knottiness of existence.”

Henry Adams subsequently commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to produce a memorial for his wife — a huge seated figure swathed in drapery that cloaks all but her raised hand and half-­illumined face. There’s no inscription, no date. Nor was any added, at Adams’s request, after he was buried at Clover’s side. Dykstra sees the statue as a belated tribute to Clover’s “artistic longing.” Henry Adams might have silently smiled. “The interest of the figure was not in its meaning,” he noted in “The Education,” “but in the response of the observer.”

CLOVER ADAMS

A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life

By Natalie Dykstra

Illustrated. 318 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26.

Brenda Wineapple’s most recent book is “White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.”

A version of this review appears in print on March 4, 2012, on page BR19 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Missing Pages. Today's Paper|Subscribe